Former number 2 of Daesh and current self-proclaimed president of Syria Ahmad al-Shareh said on March 9: “We must preserve national unity, civil peace as much as possible, and, God willing, we will be able to live together in this country as much as possible.”

The new regime increased the humiliations of the Alawites (Nuçairïs). They are fired from their jobs without being paid. In the street, the jihadists arrest them, and force them to bray like donkeys, or bark like dogs, before beating them in public. In three days, one to three thousand of them were murdered in pogroms, first on the Mediterranean coast, then throughout the country.

Thousands of Alawites took refuge in the Russian military bases in Tartus and Hmeimim where they were welcomed.

With all the jihadists currently grouped on the coast and in Damascus, the rest of Syria is free of fighters. The Turkish army took advantage of this to attack the cities of the north.

☞ Takfiri groups (i.e. those who seek to designate and kill heretics), which had been expelled in Idlib during the war against the Syrian Arab Republic, have returned to “useful Syria”. They were able to pass the roadblocks of the forces of the new government without any problem until they reached the coast and massacred the “heretics”. The Syrian population gave up its arms when President Bashar al-Assad fell. It is therefore defenseless in front of the army and the current security forces that are made up of former jihadists, generally Turkish-speaking, often Chechens, Uzbeks or Tajiks, supervised by Turkish officers.

Historically, massacres of Alawites have always been followed by massacres of Christians.

☞ The Alawite community was formed in the ninth century around Muḥammad ben Nuṣayr al-Namīrī.

It considers Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law, to be God, and Jesus and Muhammad to be his prophets. However, according to René Dussaud, who was curator of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum and private secretary to Anatole France, this community did not arise from nothing. It is said to have been constituted during antiquity, to have converted to Christianity, then to Islam, without abandoning its previous faith, such as the belief in reincarnation. It is this French theory that Israeli researchers have explored and developed.

The Alawites do not worship in public. They refer to three reference books: their Fatihat al-Kitab (catechism), the Gospels (not the Bible) and the Qur’an. For them, only the principles present in each of these three books should be considered revealed.

They were enslaved over the centuries before they were recognized as Muslims by Ayatollah Khomeini and considered equal.

Today, culturally, it is the religious group closest to Europeans, particularly in terms of women’s rights.

☞ The Assad family is Alawite. Presidents Hafez and Bashar el Assad often chose their advisers from among their close friends, i.e. from this community, but not senior civil servants who were systematically appointed with due respect for a community balance. Alawites enlisted massively in the armies, a poorly paid and dangerous profession, which other communities neglected.

☞ Ahmed el-Shareh, arguing that it was an insurrection orchestrated by General Ghiath Dalla, Maher al-Assad’s former right-hand man (now exiled in Iraq with several thousand of his men), presents these pogroms as political revenge, which makes no sense, as this community has never linked its fate to that of the Assads. This lie makes it possible to hide the resumption of the religious war that has swept across the Middle East since the Anglo-Saxons relied on the political branch of the Muslim Brotherhood to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan (recall that in Germany, the Nazis ransacked Jewish businesses and killed many of them during “Kristallnacht” while claiming to avenge the murder of a diplomat with no connection to their victims).

Last month, General Ghiath Dalla founded Awli el-Bas (Islamic Resistance Front in Syria), a militia close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. He is in no way the representative of the Alawite community, but of the fallen regime. He managed to mobilize many supporters of a secular and egalitarian state and to successfully attack several police stations and jihadist barracks.

☞ How can we not wonder about the considerable quantity of weapons and ammunition that the takfirists have today? Similarly, how can we ignore the fact that Daesh is reconstituting its forces on the Syrian-Iraqi border?

This is the editorial from our paywalled “Voltaire, international newsletter”, n°124. For more information, do not hesitate to subscribe: 500€ per year.